Banking Study - Improving User Interface for Improved Customer Experience

Business Goal

The Customer Support cell at JP Morgan Chase Bank receives millions of calls per day with customer grievances and queries. Chase intends to shorten the response time taken by the Phone Specialists for query resolution

Research Question

With the current systems the Banks’ Customer Care specialists are required to:

Switch in and out of applications to access customer information, which is leading to:

Increase in the ‘average handle time’ of customer calls

High costs incurred

Longer waiting time for customers

Therefore, how may we save millions of 'phone seconds' spent in accessing and finding required information

Solution

Chase decided to modernize the back end applications. Make a switch from legacy systems to building and implementing an integrated source - a repository which will house all of customer demographic information at a single location

Since the case study is under NDA, I have omitted and altered images, parts of the research and design results based on my discretion. The information and data in these presentations do not necessarily reflect Chase’s points of view.
2
Phases
4
Researchers
12+
Teams
45
Participant Discussions

Research Approach

Research was conducted in 2 phases.
Phase 1 was focused on understanding the Current State Experiences and Arriving at a broad Information Architecture that will encompass the new design.
Phase 2 involved testing Prototypes that emerged from Phase 1. Steps from both of the Phases are detailed below.

PHASE 1

Current State Assessment

Assess the experience with the current system. Mainly: functionality, most time consuming tasks, navigation challenges, overall current user satisfaction

User Interviews/ employee empathy maps

Understand the employee emotional experience- We used a combination of task based, open ended exploratory questions to better understand perspectives

KPI's, stressors, goals, motivators, inspiration

Detremine the Information Architecture

Card Sorting- Modify the screen flow. Identify the most intuitive spots for added tabs to better align with employee mental models when changes are required. With a focus on FRONT LAYER only, we grouped options by which task/screen it was associated with

PHASE 2

Prototype Testing

2 sprints with 1 round of usability testing each was performed.

Fully-functional, high-fidelity prototypes with the revised workflows were created. At the same time, we started recruiting subjects for the tests who fit our criteria of 5+ years of experience; mainly employees who were familiar and comfortable with the current screens

Both Prototypes were tested with 10 particpants each

Analysis: All note-taking & synthesis of data was conducted through Excel.

Here's a snippet of the executive summary from Phase i

Snippets and findings from Phase ii

4. Sharing findings widely

The final report from Phase 1 was a 65-slide PowerPoint presentation and had an audience of 70+ employees.

Due to the importance of this subject for so many teams, there was a lot of communication before the official shareout. The project was announced to broadly over 200 eager developers, designers, researchers, & product managers. The report was archived in the internal system to be read as a document, along with the creation of the formal deck.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations

With 'reduction in call duration' being a strong focal point the project is currently in its 6th iteration.

Prototypes 1 & 2 brought in several breakthroughs in terms of design. It secured drastically improved ratings with employees in terms of design, performance and served as a strong foundation upon which the subsequent iterations evolved.

6. Next Steps

01. Testing the prototype on more novice users/ new hires to determine its scalability across the company

02. Explore the balance between content presented to the Specialist and the screen loading time